Electronic mail has become a widely used business communication and organization application. The use of email has proliferated well beyond the simple act of sending and receiving messages. Email is currently used as a platform for meeting coordination and resource sharing. Additionally, applications like electronic calendars and planners are widely used alone and with email. There are a number and variety of interactive electronic calendaring systems and methods currently available to email users. The objective of all of these systems is primarily to assist the person who, for a number of different reasons, maintains a calendar of future events containing various information about the events at entry points on the calendar, which relate to the time of the event. The events (or calendar items) have a number of different parameters (e.g., location, time, resources, attendees, invitees, etc.) that help define the event.
The increased availability and usefulness of personal computers, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and intelligent workstations in recent years has made it possible for calendar owners to establish and maintain these calendars on these interactive type data processing systems. Hence, the term “electronic calendaring systems.”
It is common to organize meetings via an electronic calendaring system, and the meeting organizer can set a reminder to display an alarm for a predefined period of timer prior to beginning of the meeting. An electronic calendar user may also create to-do tasks for him/herself that also include a reminder that displays such an alarm to remind the user to do the task. Sometimes these reminders are useless. Consider, for example, a 1:00 pm meeting may have the meeting reminder set to go off at 12:45 pm, fifteen minutes prior to the beginning of the meeting. However if the user is out to lunch between the hours of 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm, the user will likely not receive the reminder in time to prepare for, or even make it to, the meeting promptly. Alternatively, the reminder may go off at a time when the user is already in another meeting, thus preventing the user from timely receiving the reminder. Another situation that may exist is that the meeting may be set for the first thing in the user's work morning, say for example 8:00 am. For this particular situation a 7:45 am reminder will not serve the user very well as the default fifteen minute reminder may not give the user enough time to travel from home to work.
There have been some attempts to address this particular problem. For instance, some calendar applications allow a meeting organizer to manually customize the meeting reminder such that it “goes off” at a more appropriate time. In a more complicated situation, each invitee to the meeting can manually customize their individual reminders themselves. This particular solution can be useful if the user is customizing only one meeting and has only one meeting in a given day. However, manually customizing reminder times can quickly become confusing and arduous if the user has several meetings in a given day and some of those meetings are back-to-back. Several other meetings and other tasks may affect the scheduling of one reminder. Moreover, the addition of a new meeting to a schedule may have a ripple effect on the already customized reminders of other meetings occurring that day. Thus, if the user adds one meeting to an already busy schedule, the user will be required to go back and manually customize every other meeting reminder for that day to ensure all reminders go off at the appropriate time.
A further complication can arise if a meeting is cancelled in a busy schedule. Under such a circumstance, some meeting reminders may now be in improper locations because their former location depended upon the other meeting occurring. With the meeting being canceled a similar ripple effect will require the user to manually customize and check each reminder of all other meetings and tasks, which as noted before can be a time consuming task for someone with a busy schedule.
Another solution would be to carry a communication device that provides reminders for meetings and/or tasks in a user's calendar. This particular solution is good in some cases as it is able to follow a particular user and does not depend on the user being in a particular location. However, this solution has several downsides as well. One downside is that the user is required to carry the communication device at all times and have that device on at all times. If the user does not have the device or the device has failed then the user will most assuredly not receive the reminder in a timely fashion. A second drawback is that if the user has back-to-back meetings it may not do the user any good to receive a reminder of the next meeting while the user is currently in another meeting. This may be especially true if the user needed to pick up some resource such as a computer or projector prior to going to the next meeting or if the next meeting is at a different location. If the user receives the reminder while in the first meeting the reminder may be of little use.